The Joys of xargs

xargs and find

August 29, 2008

xargs is an incredibly useful command: it takes in input and
executes your chosen command on it: xargs command. Deceptively
simple in concept; extremely powerful in execution. It's most commonly used
to execute one command on the output from another command (command1 |
xargs command2), and most often the output-generating command is
find (xargs is more flexible than the built-in
-exec option). Here we'll look at xargs with
find, and then at some other possibilities.

A couple of options which are useful for testing:
-t echoes the command before executing it, and -p echoes it
and asks for confirmation.

xargs and find

find and xargs do go very well together: find to
locate what you're looking for, and xargs to run the same command on
each of the things found.

Traditionally, an advantage to xargs was its ability to handle long
command lines before failing, unlike some other commands. This command:

rm `find tmp -maxdepth 1 -name '*.mp3'`

is intended to remove all tmp/*.mp3 files (and ignore any subdirectories), but can fail with an "Argument list too long" message. This exact equivalent:

find tmp -maxdepth 1 -name '*.mp3' -maxdepth 1 | xargs rm

does exactly the same thing but will avoid the problem by batching arguments
up. More modern kernels (since 2.6.23) shouldn't have this issue, but it's
wise to make your scripts as portable as possible; and the xargs
version is also easier on the eye.

You can also manually batch arguments if needed, using the -n
option.

find tmp -maxdepth 1 -name '*.mp3' -maxdepth 1 | xargs -n1 rm

will pass one argument at a time to rm. This is also useful if
you're using the -p option as you can confirm one file at a time
rather than all at once.

Filenames containing whitespace can also cause problems; xargs and
find can deal with this, using GNU extensions to both
to break on the null character rather than on
whitespace:

find tmp -maxdepth 1 -name *.mp3 -print0 | xargs -0 rm

You must use these options either on both find and xargs
or on neither, or you'll get odd results.

Another common use of xargs with find is to
combine it with grep. For example,

find . -name '*.pl' | xargs grep -L '^use strict'

will search all the *.pl files in the current
directory and subdirectories, and print the names of any that don't have a
line starting with 'use strict'. Enforce good practice in your
scripting!